Beginning Microsoft® SQL Server® 2008 Programming

Chapter 19. Playing Administrator

And so, here we are. The relative "end of the road," and yet, it's really just the beginning. It's time to talk a bit about maintenance and administration of the databases you develop.

As a developer, I can just hear it now: "Isn't that the Database Administrator's job?" If you did indeed say something like that, then step back, and smack yourself—hard (and no, I'm not kidding). If there is anything I hope to instill in you in your database development efforts, it's to avoid the "Hey, I just build 'em, now it's your problem" attitude that is all too common out there.

A database-driven application is a wildly different animal than most stand-alone applications. Most stand-alone applications are either self-maintaining, or deal with single files that are relatively easy for a user to copy somewhere for backup purposes. Likewise, they usually have no "maintenance" issues the way that a database does.

In this chapter, we're going to take a look at some of the tasks that are necessary to make sure that your end users can not only recover from problems and disasters, but also perform some basic maintenance that will help things keep running smoothly.

Among the things we'll touch on are:

• Scheduling jobs

• Backing up and restoring

• Performing basic defragmentation and index rebuilding

• Using alerts

• Using Policy Based Management

• Archiving

While these are far from the only administration tasks available, these do represent something of "the minimum" you should expect to ...